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Boggle the Mind

‘Imagine,’ by Jonah Lehrer

Have you ever wondered how Nike came by its famous slogan “Just Do It”? Neither have I, but it’s an interesting story. Dan Wieden was searching for a tag line to unify a series of ads his agency was making for Nike. Late one night he suddenly thought about the convicted murderer Gary Gil­more, whose last words before his execution were “Let’s do it.” Sitting at his desk Wieden turned that phrase over in his mind until it became “Just do it.” Accolades ensued.

Reflecting later, Wieden realized he’d thought of Gilmore because someone at work had mentioned Norman Mailer recently, and Wieden knew that Mailer had written a book about Gilmore. Without that serendipitous chain of associations, Nike might have wound up with a different slogan: “A sneaker is forever”? “Got kicks”?

Jonah Lehrer tells many stories like this in “Imagine: How Creativity Works.” Along with admen, his examples come from famous musicians and poets, obscure scientists, even large corporations like 3M and Eli Lilly. He deploys them to illustrate the science of creativity, and he derives from that science some tips for readers to become more creative and for society to promote innovative thinking.

The story-study-lesson cycle is a proven formula in science writing, but in Lehrer’s hands it grows formulaic. The stories too often feature clichéd piffle (a chance interaction, he says, can “change the way we think about everything”) and end with treacly flourishes (“This is what we sound like when nothing is holding us back”). Conclusions appear that don’t really make sense: from the intriguing fact that certain dementia patients suddenly become very creative, Lehrer deduces “an uplifting moral, which is that all of us contain a vast reservoir of untapped creativity.” But the research says nothing about “all of us,” nor whether and how we might access this conjectured reserve.

Creativity resists easy study; to measure creative potential in individuals, psychologists still rely on tests that are more than 40 years old and far from universally admired. Lehrer elides this history in favor of more recent research in two broad categories: neuroscience (what happens in the brain around moments of insight or invention) and context (what kinds of external conditions foster creative achievement).

Malcolm Gladwell says on the book’s jacket that Lehrer “knows more about science than a lot of scientists.” However he has determined this, it cannot be from this book, which includes many elementary errors. Visual information from the left eye does not go only to the brain’s right hemisphere; information from the left visual field does. The different electrodes in an EEG don’t record brain waves of different frequencies; they record from different locations on the scalp. And the enzyme COMT is not involved in producing dopamine; it breaks it down. Even simple facts are wrong. Bridgeport, Conn., is not an “abnormally wealthy” city (it is poorer than average), and the Apple I computer did not have 256 kilobytes of memory (it had 4).

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This may sound like nitpicking. But science writers, like teachers, have an obligation to get the facts right. When enough details are wrong, readers may lose confidence in the big picture.

Even when discussing basic ideas about creativity, the book is not sure-footed. Lehrer describes a test in which subjects must guess what word is associated with three others — say, “computer,” “sauce” and “crab.” In Lehrer’s account, the task requires divergent thinking: the kind that yields multiple good solutions, as when psychologists ask people to generate alternate uses for objects (e.g., using a brick to prop open a window or to cook a chicken rather than to build a house). But most psychologists agree the word test actually measures convergent thinking, a process that converges on a single right answer.

In this case, what’s interesting is that the answer (which is “apple”) seems to appear in consciousness as a flash of insight. The test captures the eureka moment in a reproducible laboratory procedure — just keep changing the words and you can run it dozens of times to reveal which brain area becomes active before the solution hits: the right anterior superior temporal gyrus. (Unfortunately, the book’s diagram labels this area incorrectly.)

More troubling is Lehrer’s failure to grasp some fundamental principles of scientific thinking. He uncritically accepts studies whose results support his argument, rarely bothering to discuss whether or how often they have been replicated. On the basis of one experiment, for instance, he claims that “being surrounded by blue walls makes us more creative.” Maybe, or maybe not. The researchers actually displayed questions on a computer screen with a blue background, and research on such “color priming” effects is hardly settled science. Perhaps Lehrer thinks the findings must be valid because they appeared in a prestigious journal. Unfortunately, real science is a messy business in which this assumption is often incorrect, and good science writers should explain as much.

Again, this is not hairsplitting. The goal of “Imagine,” according to its subtitle, is to tell us “how creativity works” — to offer a scientific, mechanistic account of a seemingly ineffable phenomenon. And what distinguishes the scientific from other modes of thinking is not its technology, level of detail or even subject matter, but its ability to discover reliable cause-and-effect relationships. The clarity of physics and chemistry is rare in social science, but this is no license for presenting interesting speculations as settled truths.

Lehrer often errs in drawing causal conclusions from data that is merely correlational. For example, after describing a study that found that highly creative employees consulted more colleagues on their projects than did less creative employees (a correlation between creativity and social interaction), Lehrer concludes, “office conversations are so powerful that simply increasing their quantity can dramatically increase creative production.” But it seems equally plausible that productive people who are brimming with ideas will be chattier than their unproductive, blocked fellows. Just as chattiness might lead to creativity, so might creativity lead to chattiness. As the study is described, either could be true. But Lehrer does not acknowledge this possibility, let alone tell us whether it has been tested.

The nadir of his book’s logic is reached when even the anecdotes don’t support the conclusions Lehrer draws from them. The lesson of “Just Do It” is said to be “the importance of incorporating a little weirdness into the creative process.” But Dan Wieden’s story — an everyday example of creativity emerging from unexpected associations — in no way establishes that deliberately adding weirdness would have any value at all. The only weirdness here is the connection between a killer and an athletic shoe, and no one incorporated it into any process.

The best way to think about “Imagine” is as a collection of interesting stories and studies to ponder and research further. Use it as a source of inspiration, but make your own careful choices about whether to believe what it says about the science of creativity.

IMAGINE

How Creativity Works

By Jonah Lehrer

Illustrated. 279 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $26.

Christopher Chabris is a psychology professor at Union College and a co-author, with Daniel Simons, of “The Invisible Gorilla, and Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us.”

A version of this review appears in print on May 13, 2012, on page BR12 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Boggle the Mind. Today's Paper|Subscribe